Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Ways to Torture a Hospital Patient

OK, so you are in a hospital. You are at the mercy of anyone who comes to visit you, or the nursing staff. It is close to impossible just to get out of bed because you are carrying a large watermelon - no something bigger....TWO watermelons - in front of you. The food is less than stellar, but you try to deal with it anyway.

What are some of the ways that you could be tortured while sitting around all day seemingly doing nothing but "relaxing"???? Let me give you a few ideas:

First and foremost, the cable/television/free movie service throughout the hospital (or at least the floor you are on) could go out. What that means is that you have no noise to drown out the floor cleaning, crying newborns (yes, soon enough they will be ours, but right now, they are not), etc. No mindless form of entertainment. The nurse offered to get me a book....very nice, but a book? Are you kidding? All I can think about is c-sections and tiny babies, etc. I can't even think of focusing on a book right now. That's why the TV (especially trash TV like on E!) is so wonderful as it is completely distracting without requiring me to do anything.

OK, so you get it...no TV is bad. Really bad. And I'm sure that the other "guests" (AKA patients) are feeling the same way.

Another way to torture a patient is to consistently come after her with needles. There is always a needle in the nurse's hand. After a while, you stop wanting to be nice and just say "Hey, don't you want to come in and chat? And leave your sharp objects behind?" They are also kind enough to warn me way in advance when I'll have an even better needle incident coming - like a new IV line. Ironic that I'm on the 3rd line, but still haven't needed an IV. They use it at first for blood work and then set up the line, just in case. It has to be redone every three days and today is the day. Hopefully it will be the one they will use during the c-section, so it means one less needle on Thursday morning.

The third and final example I can give for torturing a patient is to keep telling her to get some rest and then come in and wake her up to check her vitals, use the gel goo to get the heart rates of the babies and give her more meds or shots. Oh, and then there are the other medical visitors.....the neonatologist, lactation consultant, case worker, doctor on call, quality control personnel (that was a new one). Don't get me wrong. I've actually learned quite a bit from most of these visits, but they can arrive at anytime and without warning. It sort of hinders getting any rest because then I get into the conversation or come up with questions to ask. By the time they leave, I'm thinking about the next two to six weeks of our lives. They check vitals throughout the night - meaning midnight, 4am, etc. And those are not too invasive, so you can sort of stay in the sleep-zone, but when they check the heart beats of the babies, it requires that I really wake up. And it IS very important that they do this, but it's just funny because they keep telling me that I should really rest more. Go figure.

So, in case you didn't get it from one of the items above, our TVs are not working. I'm crossing my fingers that it gets resolved quickly, but I know that it was out at 5am, so it's not looking good. Please keep me in your prayers today as I struggle to keep entertained.... :) The babies are helping me out with that as they have really been active, so I can just sit and watch my belly jump around.

I have already been to see the doctor this morning and they did what I think was the FINAL ultrasound. Babies all looked good, so he didn't have me get hooked up for the "non-stress" test. He pointed out that I AM going to have contractions and that the babies are coming in two days, so as long as they looked good on the ultrasound and that the nurses are able to find their heart beats throughout the day, we are in good shape. THAT was the best news I had heard all day.

Not sure that I will have anything else to post today. If not, we'll check in again tomorrow. In the meantime we have LESS THAN 48 HOURS UNTIL WE ARE PARENTS!!!!! Crazy!!!!!

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